If It Isn’t Milk—It Isn’t Milk

There's more to food than meets the eye, which is why attempts to replicate meat and dairy products in the lab are bound to fail

Boston-based startup Brown Foods debuted the world’s first “lab-grown milk” last month. In a puff-piece for Forbes, the credentials of Brown’s “UnReal MIlk”—nutritional and environmental—were extolled at some length.

Not only is UnReal Milk better for the environment, we’re told it also contains all the beneficial nutrition you’d find in the milk you’re used to drinking. Using mammalian cell culture—animal cells cultivated in a bioreactor—rather than living cows, UnReal Milk “[replicates] the nutrition, taste, and texture of traditional dairy.”

Except it doesn’t. Whatever the claims about UnReal MIlk’s environmental footprint via-a-vis real milk, the nutritional claims are demonstrably false from the get-go. If its creators don’t know this, they should.

The quest to replicate natural foods in bioreactors is, at present and probably for the foreseeable future, a quest fit for a Don Quixote.

The simple truth is, we know very little—almost nothing, actually—about the compounds that are in our food, making replication a fool’s errand. This was highlighted in a 2020 scientific paper by Albert-László Barabási, of the Harvard Medical School. According to Barabási, “Our understanding of how diet affects health is limited to 150 key nutritional components”—but there are literally thousands upon thousands of compounds in natural foods, the vast majority of which we know absolutely nothing about. We don’t know what they do, we don’t even know what they are. Nada. Zip. And yet we know they’re there.

Barabási coined the term “nutritional dark matter” to describe this state of profound ignorance. Dark matter is the 85% of material in the universe physicists say is there but cannot be seen directly.

An example. A mid-century experiment with rats showed that liver contains an unknown substance that increases tremendously the endurance of rats when they’re made to swim to exhaustion. The scientists who conducted the experiment did various tests to try and identify the substance, and at least showed that it wasn’t one of the b-vitamins, but beyond that, they were stumped. They couldn’t find out what it was, but they knew it was there.

This of course has important implications, not least of all because it means that attempts to replicate animal foods using new technological processes will, invariably, fall flat. Yes, you can reproduce certain important compounds—you can get the proteins and the sugars and the fats right, more or less, and get in the main vitamins and minerals—but how can you reproduce compounds you don’t even know exist? You can’t, obviously.

If you made a lab-grown alternative to liver, there would be no way of knowing whether it contained that mysterious anti-fatigue factor that made those rats swim so long. And that mysterious anti-fatigue factor is an important part of why liver is liver.